Roveredo in Piano

The parish church of San Bartolomeo took eight centuries to be finished, and the reason is that people kept knocking it down. It was founded in the twelfth century as a dependency of the pieve of Porcia. In 1293 it was burnt by the soldiers of Gherardo III da Camino, lord of Treviso, at war with the patriarch of Aquileia Raimondo della Torre — and in those same years, by the same man's order, the village too was destroyed. They rebuilt it, and it was razed to the ground during the Turkish invasion of 1499. Many years passed before the community could get back on its feet: the new church is first mentioned in 1585. Then the village grew and the church became too small; the enlargement was designed by the architects Antonio and Stefano De Marchi, and the works, begun in 1854, dragged on far longer than expected because two epidemics of cholera got in the way. It was reopened for worship in 1872, the mosaic floor was laid in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the final consecration came only in 1912, at the hands of the bishop of Concordia.

The name is a wood: in the ancient age this land lay inside the tenth Regio, whose capital was Aquileia, and it is then that the place is called Roberetum, the oak grove — which is exactly what its Friulian and Venetian names still say, Lavorêt and Lavoréit. The first traces of people here are prehistoric: tumulus tombs, now destroyed. When Venice fell, in 1797, Roveredo was attached to Pordenone; it took its autonomy back a few years later, in the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, and after 1866 it followed the fortunes of the rest of the province of Udine. And there is one last thing that defines this village, and it was decided by a survey. For the Friulian historical, linguistic and ethnographic atlas, in the nineteen sixties, somebody came here to listen: the conclusion was that the dialect spoken at Roveredo is substantially Venetian, although traces of Friulian remain, more alive in the older generations than among the young, and with no distinction between a «vulgar» and a «civil» way of speaking. On that basis, Roveredo is not among the comuni officially recognised as Friulian-speaking.